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Quarter Track Tape question

M

motor34

New Member
Hey all,

I'm very inexperience in the vintage audio arena, and I'm here for an education.

I came across some old reel to reels - picked up a Teac A 4010S reel to reel tape deck to transfer the reels to digital format.

Some of the reels played great, others did not. Those that did not seemed to have other audio tracks playing backwards, while listening to the "forward" tracks.

I've been told this is a tape that can be played back on quarter track decks only, to isolate each track and not have them run over top of each other.

Here's my questions -

1. Can the Teac deck that I have accomodate this by changing a playback head?

2. Anyone know of a machine for sale? Just something that "works" - doesn't have to be fancy or look pretty.

2. Anyone know of a service that can transcribe these to CD?

Thanks in advance for listening!
 
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This is from the Teac 4010S Operating Instructions. Do you have a 4-track head or a half-track head?
1731005070463.png

If you are trying to playback a Mono (single track) recording, you can turn down the volume of the other channel.
1731005232268.png
For recording a tape in either mono or stereo:
1731005426891.png

Hope this helps!
 
You have both 4 track stereo tapes and 2 track stereo tapes. Your deck can only play 4T Stereo tapes. If you want to also play your 2T stereos tape you would need to buy a 2T stereo deck. Are you up for that? Or there are decks that can play both 2T and 4T tapes but they are about $2000.
 
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I suspect what you're calling a 4 track deck might be a quadraphonic deck. Those will play various old tapes because of the extra tracks.
 
See track configuration layout. Any 4 track 2 channel deck can play 2 track tapes. But with big losses (poor SNR, increased dropouts), of course. 4 track 4 channel deck is not good for reproduction of 2 track tapes too, however can be used if no 2 track deck available, but playback azimuth should be aligned very precise in this case because you should mix tracks 1&2 (left channel) and 3&4 (right channel). And only if tape was properly erased with bulk eraser before recording.
 
motor34 said:
Hey all,

I'm very inexperience in the vintage audio arena, and I'm here for an education.

I came across some old reel to reels - picked up a Teac A 4010S reel to reel tape deck to transfer the reels to digital format.

Some of the reels played great, others did not. Those that did not seemed to have other audio tracks playing backwards, while listening to the "forward" tracks.

I've been told this is a tape that can be played back on quarter track decks only, to isolate each track and not have them run over top of each other.

Here's my questions -

1. Can the Teac deck that I have accomodate this by changing a playback head?

2. Anyone know of a machine for sale? Just something that "works" - doesn't have to be fancy or look pretty.

2. Anyone know of a service that can transcribe these to CD?

Thanks in advance for listening!
Click to expand...
I do have a pioneer 1020H (the H is high speed, 7.5 and 15 IPs.) It plays but does not record
 
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